Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born October 20, 1854, in the small French town of Charleville. His father, an army captain, abandoned the family when he was six. By the age of thirteen, he had already won several prizes for his writing and was adept at composing verse in Latin. His teacher and mentor Georges Izambard nurtured his interest in literature, despite his mother’s disapproval.
Rimbaud began writing prolifically in 1870. That same year, his school shut down during the Franco-Prussian War, and he attempted to run away from Charleville twice but failing for lack of money. He wrote to the poet Paul Verlaine, who invited him to live in Paris with him and his new wife. Though Rimbaud’s moved out soon after, as a result of his harsh manners, he and Verlaine became lovers. Shortly after the birth of his son, Verlaine left his family to live with Rimbaud.
During their affair, which lasted nearly two years, they associated with the Paris literati and traveled to Belgium and England. While in Brussels in 1873, a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. Verla
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� Biography � Part 1
From the Poet to the Adventurer
Arthur in September-October 1871. Photograph by Carjat.
"The Child of Anger" "The Infernal Husband" "The Man with Foot Soles of Wind"
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"The man was tall, well-built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile, with untidy light brown hair and eyes of a disturbing pale blue"
Paul Verlaine : The Accursed Poets
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Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, in the Ardennes, October 20, 1854. His father, Captain of Infantry Fr�d�ric Rimbaud and his mother, Vitalie Cuif, descended from a farming family of Ardennes, married in 1853. Arthur had an elder brother, Fr�d�ric. His sisters Vitalie and Isabelle are born in 1858 and in 1860. Then their father definitively joined his regiment in Grenoble, leaving his wife and children. He quickly retired to Dijon. Deeply hurt, his wife kept silence on him. The children were very strictly educated, because their mother feared that they would follow the bad ex •
Summary of Arthur Rimbaud
In a burst of youthful creativity that lasted just five-years, Rimbaud succeeded in formulating a radical and influential approach to writing poetry. His illogical and spontaneous methodology upset existing conventions and proved inspirational to many who followed; especially those with links to the Symbolist, Dadaist, and Surrealist movements. Having inexplicably given up on writing poetry by the tender age of twenty, he spent the remainder of his short life as a wanderer, and as a coffee and arms dealer on the African continent. Rimbaud's output might have been limited, but it has seen him firmly established as one of the most original and important writers of his generation, and, in his personal life, one of the great anti-authoritarian troublemakers in the mythology of the modernists.
Accomplishments
Rimbaud fully tested the boundaries of traditional forms of verse. In an approach to writing verse he famously described as a "rational derangement of all the senses", Rimbaud allowed his own observations to dictate his experiments with language and